


Commissions

by Authorticity



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: 'I Have No Friends' Claims Homicidal Helicoptor Mom Friend, Friendship For Dummies, Gen, Incorrect Bar Etiquette, Non-Explicit Sexual Harrassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 14:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17045348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Authorticity/pseuds/Authorticity
Summary: “Whirl, ol' buddy.” Swerve shot him an uneasy smile, like he was second-guessing himself even as his mouth forged ahead. “Can I ask a tiny lil' favor?""Depends on what's in it for me. And by 'it,' I mean free high grade." Whirl thought about it. "Y'know, that's sounding less and less like a favor."(Or: Whirl forgets not to care long enough to earn himself a few tentative of 'non-enemies', or whatever people call them.)





	Commissions

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally titled: Whirl and Swerve Un-Ruin Everything. Seemed a little wordy.  
> Since nothing happened and everyone turns out fine, I didn't get too jiggy with the tags, but if anyone feels this should carry a weightier trigger warning for date drugs/sexual coercion, let me know.  
> EDIT: big fat thank you to owlphallacies for catching a minor error in how I described Magnus' posture! Sometimes you forget how math and spacial notation works, folks, them's the breaks.

"Oh, jeez. Oh, frag. Damn. Shit. Slag. Hell.”

Whirl zeroed in on the sound of quiet panic like a predator scenting blood. “What's got you breaking your PG rating there, half-pint?”

Swerve didn't answer right away, visor fixed on a point over Whirl's shoulder. His wide mouth was drawn into a fretful grimace. Which was a little disappointing—that was some quality referential humor, right there. Whirl had been saving that gem for days.

“Hey.” Whirl prodded him a little. “ _Hey_. What gives? That was some quality referential humor, right there. Gimme your attention.”

Swerve finally focused on Whirl, although his gaze flickered back to whatever slag was keeping his attention away from the immediate and most obviously more _engaging_ threat right in front of him. No wonder the chatty little fella was a non-combatant, with poor instincts like that. Whirl totally deserved his full attention.

“Whirl, ol' buddy.” Swerve shot him an uneasy smile, like he was second-guessing himself even as his mouth forged ahead. “Can I ask a tiny lil' favor?"

"Depends on what's in it for me. And by 'it,' I mean free high grade." Whirl thought about it. "Y'know, that's sounding less and less like a favor. But I do commissions, if that's what you're asking."

"Yeah, sure." Swerve very clearly wasn't listening. _Ugh_. He'd be so dead if he was in a completely different setting and context, acting like that. "So, uh, not to stir up any trouble—like you need _my_ help with that—but white plating with yellow visor, in the corner? Just put something in Cyclonus' drink when he wasn't looking."

 _Oh._ Whirl felt himself still, fans switching off, mindless little ticks and tells puttering to a stop. _Did he, now._

It took him a second to realize it was his combat protocols switching from Preliminary Setting 1—which they were nearly always on when he wasn't under direct fire—to Active Setting 3, which was usually reserved for fighting mechs that could, in the abstract, wreck his proverbial shop. Overkill, for a simple bar fight.

( _Shouldn't've messed with Psycho, then, should they?_ said a voice in Whirl's head. A different voice shushed it.)

"And like, far be it from me to expound on bar etiquette—except that's actually a thing, that's like a solid tenth of my personality—but that's a Bot who needs his aft kicked if ever I saw one." Swerve was still talking, eyes on the corner.

"And so you went to the expert!" Whirl played a recording of a smooching noise, flicking his claws like he was blowing a kiss. Swerve would get it. He was good like that; Whirl could recycle all the old shit he used to pull around Verity, and no one around them had a damned idea what he was doing. "I'm touched, truly. We'll call this one a freebie."

Dimly, Whirl registered that Swerve was comming Ultra Magnus as he stalked away from the counter. In Whirl's experience, enforcers didn't show up to these sorts of things until far, far after the party was over, either because of the traffic, or. Well.

( _Maybe Mags will be different_ , said a little voice deep in Whirl's processor. It sounded like the ticking of a clock, like a quiet, peaceful room, like the vocalizer he'd been forged with. Or rather, his old vocalizer, before it had been tossed in the trash along woth the rest of his head. He buried that voice deep, deep down, along with most of his least agitative emotions.)

"Really," Cyclonus was saying, as Whirl neared earshot. The look on his face was odd; and while facial expressions and their intricacies weren't Whirl's _fort_ _e_ , precisely, it only took him like eight seconds to realize it was because there was a faint, genuine smile playing across the mech's face. "I must go."

"Aw," said White Plating, slimily, with their slimy fragging voice. "One for the road, then. To new acquaintances?"

They raised their glass, smiling coyly. Cyclonus dipped his head in the briefest of nods, raising his own cube almost ceremonially, bringing it to his lips--

"To new acquaintances!" Whirl forcibly deposited himself within close combat parameters, facing the threat, close enough to be _all_ up in Cyclonus' business as he plucked the cube of contaminated high grade out of his hands.

Cyclonus snarled behind him. Whirl pre-emptively defended himself from a taloned hand ripping his frontal abdominal plating through his rear abdominal plating by sprawling across Cyclonus' lap, knocking him off-balance in at least two different contexts. He lounged, making sure all his pointy bits really dug in to the mech's joints. "Hey, this looks pretty good.” He held the cube up to the light theatrically. “Whatcha get, Cy'? A Swerve special? Praxian Racer? What's the new one called, a McFly?"

" _Whirl_ ," Cyclonus growled in his ear, and Whirl had to manually keep his combat protocols at A3.

Instead, he held the cube under his helm, swishing it around like he'd seen Tower mechs do with specialty fuels. "Interesting bouquet, amiright? Here," he stood up, shoving the cube under White Plating's stupid face. "You wanna _try_ some, fragger?"

"I—I'm good," he stammered, visor flicking between him and Cyclonus.

"I will not warn you to a second time." Cyclonus' talons bit into Whirl's rotary cages eloquently.

Whirl ignored the instinctive clarion call of _someone's in my space SOMEONE'S IN MY SPACE AND I DIDN'T PUT THEM THERE_ that started in the background like a faulty line of code, and inched the cube the tiniest bit closer. "Go on, then. Just a tiny sip, and I'll leave you to it."

White Plating flinched, as though the cube might bite them.

Cyclonus' sharpened fingers uncurled abruptly. Whirl felt him rise from his seat behind him, _finally_ getting with the fragging program. He moved around to Whirl's flank, reaching for weapons. Whirl grinned, finally letting the ammo clips click into place behind his barrels--

The door to the bar slammed open. " _Who_ the _FUCK,"_ snarled Tailgate, as Ultra Magnus stalked past him as a wave of Blue, Bureaucratic Fury.

Whirl's systems malfunctioned. They dialed back all the way from Active 3 to Inactive 2, leaving him faintly light-headed. Whirl should really have Ratchet take a look at that, he decided, as Magnus zeroed in on White Plating with that incandescently angry, Set Rulebooks to Kill look he sometimes got; as Swerve ran out from behind the counter, talking a mile a minute; as Tailgate scurried over to stand _protectively_ in front of him and Cyclonus, his chubby little face set like maybe _his_ combat protocols were inching their way toward Active 1.

 _Definitely,_ Whirl thought, as Cyclonus shot him an unreadable look as Tailgate ushered him out the door, bobbing angrily by his side like a soap bubble of wrath. _Combat protocols switching almost completely off when_ _a mech didn't feel at home_ _could be a real hazard._

...

Twenty-three minutes later, Whirl was fleeing the medbay with a cackle on his vocalizer, a wrench flying over his shoulder, and the dulcet tones of Ratchet's angry yelling to drown out the fuzzy, wobbly feeling still flittering around in his chest.

...

"Ugh." said Whirl, draping himself over the edge of the ridiculously uncomfortable chair.

"A brief statement will do," Ultra Magnus said, inexorably. "If you would return to the moment you were first made aware of the situation--"

"UUUGH," said Whirl, draping himself further.

Ultra Magnus breathed in through his mouth, out through his nose, for a perfect count of three. There was something plastic about the mech that rubbed Whirl the wrong way; too clean, too pure, as though he had waded through the bloodiest parts of a four-million-year civil war and somehow emerged undefiled. Whirl itched to slash a claw over his faceplates, jab one of the fragger's perfectly maintained styluses through his hand. Magnus didn't _deserve_ to be clean, not when the likes of Whirl and every other Lost Lighter had been gnarled and twisted until they couldn't recognize themselves.

"Whirl," Ultra Magnus frowned, leaning the tiniest fraction back in his chair, as though 103 degrees made him appear any more relaxed or casual than his customary 90 degree sit. "There is nothing I want more in this moment than to have you out of this office. I imagine that wish is in alignment with your own f... _fff_ —ahem. Feelings on the matter. Thus, the path of least resistance—namely, giving your statement in a truthful and forthright manner—is in your own immediate interest."

"I _guess_ ," Whirl said. He babbled a recap of events without really thinking about it. He'd done this at the end of nearly every other shift, as an Enforcer.

Magnus typed it all as fast as Whirl said it. He paused after he had finished. "That's not Cybertronian terminology."

"What's not?"

"'Roofied,' you said. You used it to refer to the act of knowingly drugging another person without their knowledge, usually through the the contamination of a beverage. That's an English phrase." Magnus studied him closely.

"Oh." Whirl fought the pang of nostalgia by stomping on it until it curled back into its easily ignore-able fetal position in the shady recesses of his mind. "Yeah, well. S'not like you had some kinda Verity Carlo _monopoly_ going on, back in the day."

A moment of cameraderie passed between them, as between two people who had seen the same friend wasted and drunkenly ranting about the same exact thing. That moment died a swift and succinct death, and was never brought up ever again.

"So, if that's all--" Whirl headed for the door.

"It most certainly is not--" Magnus said, before the door slid shut over his affronted face.

...

The next time Whirl went to Swerve's, he had only sat down for a few moments before Cyclonus slid gracefully onto the stool to his right. Tailgate heaved himself up onto the stool to his left, legs kicking as he pushed himself up.

"So," Tailgate said, leaning the teeniest, tiniest, bit over to rest softly against Whirl's arm. “Whatcha getting?”

"Oh, Primus," Whirl said. "I accept gratitude in the form of IOU's and monetary rewards. No prolonged interaction necessary, really. _Really._ "

"I was considering the McFly," Cyclonus commented gravely, as though Whirl had never spoken. "I'm told it's provocative of Earth fuels."

"You got five seconds to move, pipsqueak," Whirl twitched his arm.

Tailgate straightened so that he wasn't actively touching Whirl, just leaning towards him like he thought he was some kinda pet, like maybe he was looking for a frag (like maybe he just wanted to be near Whirl?). And it was gross and weird and Whirl could feel the calm weight of Cyclonus on one side and Tailgate on the other, and he _could've_ made them frag off, and he was _gonna_ , but honestly? Why even bother. Slag them. Slag Whirl.

If he let his arm brush the tiniest bit to the side to graze Tailgate's elbow, none would say.

(Except Swerve, who saw the entire thing.)


End file.
